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Opinions Archive: 2007

How could we, centuries after the abolition of slavery; thousands of memoirs, books and dissertations later that explicate the detriments of racism; hundreds of policies ratified with aims to circumvent the social stagnation wrought through racism, we as an international community have moved no further.Continue...

Eighteen years have passed since the Montreal massacre in which 14 women were killed by an anti-feminist shooter at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Since this tragic event, Dec. 6 has become a memorial day for violence against women.Continue...

I was disappointed, to say the least, by the content in the Queen’s vs. Kingston issue. While town-gown relations are an important topic, I did not find the articles to be informative or relevant to the Queen’s-Kingston situation. To the contrary, these articles highlighted issues such as property tax payments (granted by the Provincial government to the town) and increasing class sizes (a result of increased university enrollment province-wide).Continue...

It seems that our esteemed student trustee Michael Ceci has taken issue with my characterization, in a pro-CFS opinion piece published in your paper, of the Board of Trustees being dominated by corporate types—bank executives to be specific—who have a vested interest in seeing our tuition and our debt continue to rise.Continue...

Mr. Horkins contends that the University Board of Trustees is “dominated by bank executives with a vested interest in our rising debt.” A cursory look at the biographies of the members of the Board (queensu.ca/secretariat/trustees/bios.html) show that only five of the 44 members currently have any form of relationship to a bank organization. Mr. Horkins displays an ignorance of the tuition framework by using a simplistic catch-all to explain a complex issue.Continue...

The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is a coalition, co-founded by Queen’s, of 125,000 students from seven Ontario universities that lobbies the provincial government on student issues—tuition, financial aid and teaching quality, to name a few.Continue...

I was first in line for Queen’s Players tickets last Thursday and I want to apologize to everyone further back. People numbered seven and eight cut in line. I knew it and although I talked to them about it and asked them to leave, come number time I failed to do anything about it. People numbered nine and ten were kind enough not to point it out as well, although I’m sure they were aware of it after spending close to seven hours in line with the first six of us.Continue...

I fundamentally disagree with Garrison’s view that “It’s not very productive to continue the weak argument that the two [Homecoming and Aberdeen] are separate. Queen’s has to accept that the two go hand in hand and find a solution that is going to impact both.” To assert that Aberdeen is a result of Homecoming simply because the street party occurs after Homecoming starts is not just a weak argument but a logical fallacy.Continue...

I was appalled to read “City wants Queen’s to foot the bill” which outlined city council’s decision to have Queen’s pay all extra costs for municipal reinforcements during homecoming. The council’s actions betray a clear prejudice against the Queen’s community and many remarks about its students were totally unreasonable.Continue...

In September of this year, the “Cowboys and Indians” themed party that was posted as an event on Facebook using the Queen’s University network deeply disturbed many Aboriginal (and non-Aboriginal allied) students, faculty and staff on the Queen’s University campus and in the greater Kingston community.Continue...

First, I agree with Eddie Ho’s conclusion that the administration of this university is not responsible for policing costs associated with the Aberdeen Street party. However, I take issue with most of the rest of his assertions. If he thinks it is a fact that Queen’s attracts “the top students and researchers from around the world,” I fear he has swallowed a little too much of the Frosh Week Kool-Aid. Queen’s is a great university, but it’s a large-ish fish in a pretty small pond.Continue...

Whether it’s students frantically trying to type every word that drops from the instructor’s mouth, back-row slackers mindlessly playing solitaire or professors reading aloud the text of their Powerpoint slides, Lisa Jemison suggests that the introduction of the computer into the classroom has undermined the personal connections that once made university classes special places to be.Continue...

As a graduate student here at Queen’s, I am not proud of the events that seem to inevitably occur each Homecoming weekend. I freely admit there are a number of students out there who make terrible choices, doubtlessly fuelled by the hype of what they mistakenly assume to be ‘tradition.’ However, this feeling of shame is nothing to what I would feel if I had chosen to be represented by Lakeside district councillor Dorothy Hector.Continue...